gnome settings unexpected values

[Chris Murphy]

On Sep 25, 2013, at 2:41 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> By my understanding, if there's a 'transient' hostname then it is likely
> to be the currently "active" hostname, not the 'static' one.

Well that's a problem. Linguistically transient means impermanent, so it should be the least likely hostname compared to static.

Also, on this same machine that Gnome uses the transient name for, I must use the static name when ssh'ing into it. So apparently Avahi is using the static hostname, which is what I'm expecting. But Gnome isn't. For me. Because Ed is saying it's using static for him, not transient.

> The
> 'static' one is kind of a permanent fallback value which can possibly
> get overwritten by a 'transient' one on network init, but the 'static'
> one is tracked because that's what the hostname will fall back to if the
> 'transient' one goes away for some reason.

Oh dear sweet mother of leaping lizards all choking on a stick.

Now, after having set separate --static and --transient hostnames with hostnamectl, on reboots it never appears in hostnamectl. It was only there briefly after having set it, and then polling it right after.

Maybe I shouldn't be setting one of these. Doesn't anaconda only set static?

> (At least, that's my best understanding ATM. I've been poking this stuff
> lately in the context of getting IPA set up, and I suspect hostname is a
> bit like xkb - seems simple on the surface, turns out to be
> pyschopathically complicated when you get into the details.

I'm thinking networking in general is psychopathically complicated, which is why there are an increasing number of people getting PhDs in this field. Or maybe that's what's causing it to become psychopathically complicated.

I'm thinking the local router, whether it has local DNS on or not, dnsmasq on or not, etc. etc. is a factor also. I once had some version of dd-wrt that would cause a LiveCD booted F17 or F18 to name itself the hostname for that same machine when it was booted in OSX. So OS X told the router something about its hostname, and then some conversation between the router and Fedora XX occurred even when booting off Live media to set the hostname of the live session.


> There seem
> to be three different kernel syscalls for 'querying the hostname', which
> can all return different results in different circumstances. Try
> 'hostname' and 'hostname -f'…)


[root at f20s ~]# hostname
f20s.localdomain
[root at f20s ~]# hostname -f
hostname: Name or service not known
[root at f20s ~]# hostnamectl
   Static hostname: f20s.localdomain
         Icon name: computer-laptop
           Chassis: laptop
        Machine ID: 8e4cbfea404512ae70096c6202c9a3bf
           Boot ID: 1c344d5b57f24088adf3e29da63ca966
  Operating System: Fedora 20 (Heisenbug)
       CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:20
            Kernel: Linux 3.12.0-0.rc2.git0.1.fc21.x86_64
      Architecture: x86_64


Meanwhile Gnome still says oldmac.localdomain. Cute…



Chris Murphy